One of the weirdest things of our universe, now that we know it is so mind-bogglingly BIG, is that no communication between intelligent species of different planets seems to exist (at least in what regards us).

Some take this as the last plausible reason why we should think intelligent life is not pervasive throughout the galaxies. But a more plausible explanation is that they would have a good reason not to interact with us. And the reason is the same way we would not go out of our way to know a colony of ants! What would we say to them? They only know how to smell, walk, transport, and are dictated by a reduced number of orders. Might we not look the same to, say, a billion-year more advanced species?

Obviously, we cannot even imagine the conceptual abilities or knowledge these beings might have (otherwise we would be already at that stage). But one thing we know: if they are morally advanced, they would have nothing at all with us, and this is easy to see:

Our politics is based on hypocrisy, selfishness predominates everywhere, in the form of economic gains or geostrategic and political dominance. What would our everyday politics look to an alien species looking at our world? They would see everyone willing to kill one another for a piece of land, for pieces of money, cars and oil, for religious dogmas. To an alien species, this would look not only barbaric, it would look as if we were only little monkeys that just had their brain slightly updated. These talking monkeys would not see, even with all the galaxies surrounding them, clearly, in the sky, that a small piece of land couldn’t pay unhappiness. But big politics is just the tip of the iceberg. Look at how we treat children, the poor, the mentally weak. We take advantage of everything we can, but what are we to gain? For every power we might derive from an injustice is certainly unable to pay for the sorrow and hollowness of our crime. We force children to attend whatever we might think is good for them, and, in this way, we continue to feed our unhappy way of life (always on the run, always forced to do the things we do not like, forced by the same system imposed on us and that we impose on others), we think the poor are “others”, which means, not worthy of attention. If we have cars, and comfortable homes, and they don’t, what sense would it make to take one out of the street and feed him home, and give him what he’d be wanting all his life? But no! He might break a vase! The mentally weak, whatever their problem might be, is certain to become much worse in the hands of the psychiatric circuit, of manipulating everything until some decent, acceptable (to others) result is found. When a “patient” is cured of his strange manners, then he is ready to become, like all the other “normal” people, just another more piece in the machine. And what we do to some other forms of our ‘properties’, namely sentient beings deemed non-human, is simply astonishing, and reveals, if we had the power of God, how our actions would be.

Now, tell me, which advanced species would want to have contact with a society that live only for the petty little things they say they own?